Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young

Preface

IX PREFACE My family entered the television age in February 1954, when The Loretta Young Show was in its first season. Then, my only interest was live television . I delighted in Studio One and Robert Montgomery Presents, which brought theatre into our parlor, along with missed cues, flubbed lines, and camera gaffes that actually enhanced the immediacy of the experience . Filmed television was movies; live television, even variety shows, like The Ed Sullivan Show and The Perry Como Show, were theatre. My mother watched I Love Lucy and The Loretta Young Show. I did not—then. I knew who Loretta Young was. I probably saw her before 1944, but my earliest memory of Loretta Young is a scene from And Now Tomorrow (1944) that lodged itself in my memory. (Little did I know at the time that I would be writing her biography.) It is the scene when Loretta, now hearing-impaired, awakens to the sight of a rain-streaked window. But there is no sound. She knows she should hear the impact of the rain against the glass, but cannot. I had no idea what a subjective camera or a POV shot were, but I shared Loretta’s fear, reflected in a face that, still beautiful, had taken on a kind of delicately expressed alarm, devoid of histrionics and panic—the sort of expression one would expect from a well-bred woman facing the first crisis in her life. I also had fond memories of The Farmer’s Daughter, and, as the product of a Catholic grade school education, of Come to the Stable, in which Loretta’s Sister Margaret corresponded to the kind of nun with whom I was familiar: the nun who uses her gentle, and often wily, powers of persuasion to accomplish her end—always, of course, for the greater glory of God. Because my mother rhapsodized about The Loretta Young Show, I decided to watch it with her, but just once—or so I thought. I was mesmerized by Loretta’s much touted entrance, in which she executed a 180-degree turn while closing the door—her dress seeming to rotate with her—and then breezed into the living room where she purred her welcome. My first thought was, “How phony!” But after I saw a few more episodes, P R E FA C E X I knew that what might have seemed like artifice was Loretta’s special form of theatre. It wasn’t live, but she made it seem as if it were, particularly with that iconic entrance so reminiscent of the way a star makes her first appearance in a Broadway play. But that was Loretta—a star doing a star turn. In 1954, I did not appreciate the historic significance of The Loretta Young Show, unaware that it was the first truly successful (it ran eight seasons ) attempt at anthology television—not a show that used the sitcom format, in which the stars play the same characters in each episode—but one following the repertory model, in which the star appears in a different vehicle each week. If asked how to define The Loretta Young Show in 1954, I would have said: “Thirty-minute movies.” That’s how they struck me. And, in a sense, I think my original definition holds true: They were truncated movies. I had not thought much about Loretta over the years until the mid1990s when Judy Lewis, her daughter by Clark Gable, published Uncommon Knowledge, in which Lewis divulged the details of her birth, the result of a liaison between the unmarried Loretta and the married Gable while they were filming The Call of the Wild (1935). I thought I was reading a treatment for a woman’s picture, with a cover-up that seemed like something out of an unwed mother movie of the 1930s—Loretta as Stella Dallas. Judy’s Loretta Young was not the plucky Katie of The Farmer’s Daughter or the saintly Sister Margaret. There was a real person, in some ways a tragic one, behind the Loretta Young who glided through the door, ready to offer another character from a repertory that seemed to defy categorization. I knew then that I wanted to tell Loretta’s story, but from a different perspective, focusing on the woman and her films. It is impossible to separate the artist from the art when it is the art that reveals the artist. The films, beginning with Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), which made a star...